Horton Hears a Who!

The animation by Steve Martino and Jimmy Hayward comes from a picture book and fills the gap by inventing. Martino has said Seuss left large white spaces on the page for text and artwork, and they had to be filled to reach feature length. So a viewer who has read the book aloud to a child will not find most of what is on screen anywhere in it. The design has one rule the film keeps: the architecture and the vehicles all look hand drawn, and nothing sits on a straight line. Inside the crew the standard was called being entertainingly correct. Chris Meledandri spent two years chasing the rights. Audrey Geisel was against turning her husband’s books into computer animation; Blue Sky won her over with models and sculptures, among them the mayor holding JoJo above his head. Hayward also wrote in a short anime style fight scene as a nod to Japanese animation. The film cost 85 million dollars and took 298.6 million worldwide. A good fit if you do not mind scenes that are nowhere in the book taking up most of the picture, and a pastiche anime fight in the middle of it. Not for viewers who want an adaptation faithful to Seuss line by line; the blank spaces were filled with new scenes.